The Threshold Grace eBook

When the long working-day of life is wearing away
its last hours and verging towards the great stillness,
the voices of time fall but faintly on the ear, the
adorations and ideals and fashions and enthusiasms
of the world come to mean little to a man who in his
day has followed them as eagerly as any, and the heart
within him asks only for rest.

God, if there be none beside Thee
Dwelling in the light,
Take me out of the world and hide me
Somewhere behind the night.

When, like Simeon the seer with the Christ-Child in
his arms, a man feels that for him life has said its
last word and shown its last wonder and uttered its
last benediction, the desire for rest is a pure and
spiritually normal thing; it is just the soul’s
gaze turned upward where

beyond
these toils
God waiteth us
above,
To give to hand and heart the spoils
Of labour and
of love.

And maybe this mood of which we are thinking may have
a not unworthy place in a strenuous life. As
a tired woman pauses amid her tasks and looks out
of her cottage window to take into her heart the quiet
beauty of the woods where she knows the ground is
fair with lilies, so do we find ourselves looking
out of life’s small casement and thinking upon
the fresh, free, ‘outdoor’ life the soul
will some day live. And such a mood as this is
surely a sign of the soul’s growth, a testimony
of its responsiveness to the divine touch, a sudden
sense of its splendid destiny borne in upon it among
the grey and narrow circumstances of its service.

Oh that I had a dove’s swift, silver
wings,
I said, so I might straightway leave behind
This strife of tongues, this tramp of
feet, and find
A world that knows no struggles and no
stings,
Where all about the soul soft Silence
flings
Her filmy garment, and the vexèd mind
Grows quiet as there floats upon the wind
The soothing slumber-song of dreamless
things.
And lo! there answered me a voice and
said,
Man, thou hast hands and heart, take back
thy prayer;
Covet life’s weariness, go forth
and share
The common suffering and the toil for
bread.
Look not on Rest, although her face be
fair,
And her white hands shall smooth thy narrow
bed.

XI.

A NEW SONG

O sing unto the Lord a new song.

Ps. xcvi. 1.

Time and again in the Psalter we find this appeal
for a new song. First of all, and most obviously,
the appeal concerns the contents of the song.
It reminds us of the duty of making our grateful acknowledgement
of God’s goodness to us expand with our growing
experience of that goodness. It is, if, one may
so phrase it, a reminder to us that our praise needs
bringing up to date. A hymn considerably later
in date than this psalm exhorts us to ‘count’
our ‘blessings,’ and to ‘name them